Amin Azzam, MD

Health Sciences Associate Clinical Professor

Contact Information

Narrative

Amin completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Rochester, before starting medical school at the Medical College of Virginia. During medical school, he participated in the inaugural year of the National Institutes of Health’s “Clinical Research Training Program.” After completing medical school, he participated in the research track of the general adult psychiatry residency program at the University of California, San Francisco Department of Psychiatry. He then completed a two-year research fellowship in psychiatric genetics at the San Francisco Veterans’ Administration Medical Center, before discovering that his true passion was in medical education. Deciding that 27 years of formal education just wasn’t enough, he went back to school for a two-year masters’ degree in education, at the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on quantitative methods and evaluation. He is now an Associate Clinical Professor at both the Berkeley and San Francisco campuses of the University of California.

Currently, he wears five hats:
1. Director of the “Problem-Based Learning” curriculum at the UC Berkeley—UCSF Joint Medical Program,
2. Co-Director of the “Foundations of Patient Care” course for first and second-year medical students at UCSF,
3. Co-Director of the “Health Professions Education” Pathway to Discovery at UCSF,
4. Faculty Chief for Trainee Professional Development at the UCSF Department of Psychiatry, and
5. Chair, Scholarship Working Group of the UCSF Academy of Medical Educators.

His research interests include exploring the efficacy of various instructional approaches in stimulating medical students’ acquisition, retention, and application of content knowledge in their evolving roles as clinicians. Pregnancy

Recent Publications

Hoover CR, Wong CC, Azzam A. From primary care to public health: using problem-based learning and the ecological model to teach public health to first year medical students. J Community Health. 2012 Jun; 37(3):647-52.View in: